Efficient Automated Synthesis, Programing, and Implementation of Multi-Processor Platforms on FPGA Chips

Emerging embedded System-on-Chip (SoC) platforms are increasingly becoming multiprocessor architectures. The advances in the FPGA chip technology make the implementation of such architectures in a single chip feasible and very appealing. Although the FPGA chip technology is well developed by companies such as Xilinx and Altera, the concepts and the necessary tool support for building multiprocessor systems on a single FPGA chip are still not mature enough. As a consequence, system designers experience significant difficulties in 1) designing multiprocessor systems on FPGAs in a short amount of time and 2) programming such systems in order to satisfy the performance needs of applications executed on them. In this paper we present our concept for multiprocessor system design, programing, and implementation that addresses and solves the above two problems in a particular way. We have implemented the concept in a tool called ESPAM which is briefly introduced as well. Also, we present some results obtained by applying our concept and ESPAM tool to automatically generate multiprocessor systems that execute a real-life application, namely a Motion-JPEG encoder.